PIERCE THE VEIL’S I CAN’T HEAR YOU WORLD TOUR

FRAY Studio led creative production for the visuals behind Pierce the Veil’s latest tour—the most ambitious of the band’s near 20-year career. Cassius Creative commissioned the studio to join production after the band’s management saw FRAY’s work for Glass Animals’ Tour of Earth and expressed their desire to work with both companies.

The studio centred its approach around Pierce the Veil’s recent tour branding, which was based on halftone print aesthetics, featuring mainly yellow, red, blue, black, and white in a grunge style. FRAY’s Kira O’Brien and Norvydas Genys amalgamated custom HLSL shaders to evoke halftone effects and a homemade grunge overlay, which remained applied throughout production. This allowed for a cohesive through line and brought songs together as a single piece.

The vast majority of the show was rendered fully in real time, with the creative team using live camera feeds processed in Notch 1.0—with only one song using pre-rendered material. The team found Notch’s new Combiner nodes especially helpful in combining modifier inputs to create new modifier outputs. They also used Notch’s Virtual Background feature to foreground the band members during special moments.

Because the band wanted to avoid overcrowding screens with visuals that might distract from their performances, the team worked with the camera director to choreograph sections that demonstrated the band’s stage presence.

The preparation maximised a sense of dynamism noted in The Cosmic Clash, where Drew Doggett wrote, “The band moved between lush, layered compositions and jagged breakdowns with veteran confidence” and summarized the overall show as “a sonic celebration of screamo that reaffirmed the band as a dominant force in post-hardcore.”

Additional press coverage:

The Cosmic Clash, The Dallas Observer, The Concert Chronicles, Go Venue Magazine.